Four decades ago, a man took lots of photos of some working-class people having a day out at the seaside. The resort was New Brighton on Merseyside, and the photos showed that the sun shone, the ice creams were runny and lots of people fell asleep in their deckchairs, resulting in their faces turning fire-engine
The biggest rebel in my year at school (a pretty raggedy state comprehensive near Chester) was a guy called Paul. He had very long hair, wore a trench coat and was regularly told to ‘have a bath’ by the more boorish elements of the playground. Paul railed against the system in the way that only teenagers
Half a century ago today, the Duke of Kent, Anthony Hopkins and 97 other diners had a meal of caviar and lobster canapés followed by grilled steak, all washed down with Dom Perignon. There was nothing too unusual about this slightly ostentatious menu, one that was a typical example of 1970s British fine dining. But it
The only time I ever saw David Bowie live was at a ropey festival in an old airfield near Stratford-upon-Avon in the latter half of the 1990s. Frankly, I thought he was pretty awful. It was the peak of Britpop, electronica and trip hop were in the ascendency and the campsite and smaller stages that
Bernard Herrmann died 50 years ago this month. He only just lived long enough to complete the suite of instrumental jazz that’s now regarded as not only his finest work across many decades as a movie composer, but one of the greatest celluloid soundtracks of all time. There are very few movies which you can
Among all the perfidies of public transport in Britain (a nation that can build a £40 billion railway based on the premise that the outskirts of Acton counts as a ‘central London’ terminus), perhaps the most ludicrous of all is this. On 26 December, a day when millions of us need to move about, no
The first thing I should tell you about my relationship with Christmas is that I’m not saturated in essence of humbug. My approach to a big family Christmas is the same as my relationship with Mexican food: if it’s put in front of me I’ll enjoy it, but I probably wouldn’t ever purposely seek it
There’s a trading estate, which might possibly need an envoy. There’s a Pizza Express, whose user ratings online are the equal to the Woking branch. And there’s also a branch of Boots which has a solid range of deodorants. Should Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor ever acknowledge any perspiration issues, desire a pepperoni or feel like taking on a
Food courts appear to be everywhere in London at the moment and, for reasons too boring to go into here, I found myself at three of them across the capital in the space of four days last week. (Yes, before you ask, I am beginning to question my life choices as a result.) Not that
Back in the early 1990s, I was a teenage visitor to an array of dilapidated Victorian cow sheds masquerading as third and fourth division football grounds as I supported my team, Wrexham FC, on their travels. There were still many pre-Hillsborough fences in place, some of which (most notably in the away end at Crewe
Like most freelance writers, I have a notepad full of jottings which come under the loose category of ‘Ideas I Probably Won’t Get Round To Doing As I Doubt Anyone Will Be Interested, They’re A Bit Rubbish Anyway And It Probably Wouldn’t Pay Much’. Around halfway down this list is a book provisionally entitled A
If Christmas is a time for giving then it seems the message isn’t getting through to nearly enough office managers. For the umpteenth year running, I’m getting the annual stream of resigned-sounding complaints from friends who have office-based careers. Office life has its perks, of course; unlike my mostly-bed-and-airport-based freelance life, you actually know what
There may well be, somewhere in this nation of ours, a long-established succession of sensitive, emotionally aware 14-year-olds who can appreciate and denounce the impact of bullying. But, honestly, none of them went to my school. It doesn’t sound like there were many of this cadre at Dulwich College half a century ago either. At
In the mid-1990s, ecstasy was a drug of the suburbs. My friends and I, all A-level students and shortly to become beneficiaries of the final years of higher education that didn’t come with tuition fees, did not fit the model of ‘drug users’ that the media, still in thrall to 1980s heroin hyperbole, fixated on.
I was sitting in a hotel restaurant in Cheshire a while back: one of those rambling country manors, full of mock Jacobean wood panelling and fake Tiffany lamps, beloved of football-and-property enriched couples with gravy hued fake tans, sports cars parked outside and more signet rings than GCSEs. I was hungry and alone, aside from,
I first got a door slammed in my face in 1987. Looking back, I can’t help but feel that moment, at the age of eight, was my first bit of training as a journalist. I wasn’t seeking a scoop back then, of course. For eight-year-olds a scoop is something you get two of with your
Queen’s ascendency began at around the same time as the first residents were moving their Axminster carpets and Party Sevens into Tower Hamlets’ Robin Hood Gardens, the Smithson-designed Brutalist estate that would go on to become a typical example of how post-war ‘streets in the sky’ concepts were almost always doomed to fail. Five decades
‘Live fast, die old’ ran the strapline to the David Brent: Life On The Road film a decade ago. The movie itself was a textbook example of how unwise it is to attempt to cash in on the earlier (read: much funnier) successes of your career. Not that Ricky Gervais gives a damn while residing
The SS Californian deserves more than mere footnote status when it comes to its role in the story of the RMS Titanic. For that was the name of the ship that sent repeated messages to the crew of the doomed cruise liner, all of them warning of ice ahead. But the Titanic’s wireless operators weren’t
The name can’t help but invite mockery. When Sainsbury’s launched its ‘Taste the Difference’ range 25 years ago this autumn, I wasn’t alone in noting that the phrase almost begged for a question mark at the end. But the British public are (mostly) more concerned with dinner than with sarcasm. The Taste the Difference range
